So I have been putting off writing about India because it has seemed like a daunting task. I was pretty much in awe the whole time. I had so many different experiences in five days and felt so many different ways. There was a small emotional rollercoaster going on inside of me. There were times that I was in love with India and there were times when I just wanted to get the hell out. I saw a lot of ugly, but a lot of beautiful, and sometimes was lucky enough to find the beautiful in the ugly. I will also say that India is a humongous country and there is so much disparity. While I was spending time in Dalit villages I had friends who were staying in homes of the wealthiest people in Chennai. So this, as always, is simply my small impression of the vast country that is India!
I guess I will start off with our first day. My first two days in India I spent traveling with my friend Kristi, her roommate Steph, and our friend Steve. Most people took more extensive trips to Delhi, but we had other engagements on our third day and had to get back sooner so we traveled together. As soon as we got off the ship the first day we headed straight to the airport for our flight to Delhi. Before being able to leave the ship yard we had to go through a government check point. They looked you up and down and wrote your name and customs information down in a huge handwritten ledger. It just seemed unnecessary to have to do such a thing before entering and leaving every time. Anyway, we walked through the gate and haggled with some rickshaw drivers and piled into one to the airport. We were five minutes out and still arguing with the driver over the price. It was about a 40 minute ride to the airport and was quite an adventure. The expressways in India are as wide as six lines, but have no lane demarcations. There are big rigs, cars, rickshaws, and motorbikes all fighting to go the fastest and it just seems unreal. When you stop at a light, you can literally reach out and touch the people next to you. We survived, and had a relaxing 2.5 hour flight to Delhi. Our airline had personal televisions on the back of every seat, so I was content.
We got into Delhi at around 9 and had hired a driver to pick us up. This was probably the best decision we made regarding our trip. The Taj Mahal is about a 3 hour drive from Delhi so the driver was ours until the end of the next day when he would bring us back to Delhi. It was really nice not having to worry about train schedules and cabs because haggling gets really annoying. It ended up being about $40 for each of us for the driver, and a lot of saved trouble. We had our driver, Sukhbir, take us to eat and then headed out for Agra. Another reason I am glad we drove rather than took the train was because of the views. I feel like all my traveling time wasn’t wasted because I got to see so much of India from our window. That first nights drive was so interesting. We weren’t on the road for five minutes and we were dodging herds of cows walking through the street. This continued for the rest of the trip. As it got later, the nightlife died and not too many people were out, but I was able to see some really shocking things. I can’t tell you how many people I saw sleeping on the side of the freeway or streets with nothing more than a blanket covering and no possessions. The shop owners pull out for post woven rope beds in front of their shops to sleep and the rickshaw drivers sleep in their vehicles with their feet dangling over the edge. The thing that makes everything in India so interesting is how large their population is. So anything that you see, you never see one or two of, you see mass amounts.
So we didn’t really get much sleep that night, about 3 hours. We stayed within five minutes of the Taj Mahal so we could make it to sunrise in the morning. I couldn’t be happier that we did this. The Taj made our long trek soo worth it. The building is really spectacular and pictures just don’t do it justice. The sun rose at about a 45 degree angle to the Taj and it made the building glow! They say it changes colors every hour based on where the sun is positioned. We saw a few fellow SASers there which was fun. Also, we had an interesting photo shoot with an Indian man. He offered to take a picture of us and then began telling us how to pose and things. After the third shot I knew we were going to have to pay him. But, he knew where all the great places to take pictures were so it was nice. He wasn’t happy with my payment though, which really annoyed me because we never asked him to help us. But, often they will say things like that because you are white and they know you have money. Doing something for someone without being asked and then expecting money is popular in India, so you have to make sure to ignore them if you don’t want the favor.
After we saw the Taj, Sukhbir took us to some shops in Agra before heading back to Delhi. We went to a marble shop and watched them make engraved pieces in the style of the Taj which was really cool. Our drive was great again. It was cool to see what I had seen at night during the day. We came to learn really fast that honking is part of the way Indians drive. It is actually part of their driving laws that you should honk when you are passing, so napping wasn’t really gonna happen.
We got to Delhi that evening. I really had mixed feelings about Delhi. I wanted to explore the city and see the sights, but it really overwhelmed me. It is a huge city and is very fast paced and loud. There aren’t too many sidewalks. We were really tired anyway from so much traveling and had an early flight back in the morning so we retired early. Pretty much everyone that traveled to the North of India like we did agreed it was a lot of traveling. I am so glad that I saw the Taj. I really didn’t know if I would ever be back to India again and so I thought it would be worth it, and it was. At this point, I was not the biggest fan of India. It really scared me. It felt so ungraspable. It was also really dirty, they don’t have trash policies, so they just throw it anywhere. Parks are filled with trash, in fact, any open space is. Men pee anywhere and everywhere so the smell of stale urine is quite common. The poverty was so evident everywhere. In between every building there were huge shanty towns where peoples homes where made of random tarps, fabrics, and aluminum making a thatched hut look luxurious. We had learned so much about India’s rising economy and globalization and the flattening of the world and I didn’t see any of it. I never thought there could be such extremes in one place. One of my teachers has since referred to India as a developed country within a developing country, which I think is a much better way of presenting it. I know there is homelessness everywhere; I just couldn’t imagine driving a Mercedes Benz past shantytowns where children have no shoes. The proportion of people with money to homeless at home is so different to the situation in India because there are millions and millions and millions. The caste system in India is so alive. Though illegal, the labeling of these castes still occurs and hinders Indians’ ability to move up in the world. This idea, that fixing a problem runs deeper than charity, kinda leads me into the next portion of my trip. (in between here, I left Delhi, arrived back in Chennai and am now embarking on another trip, sponsored by SAS)
The trip that I signed up for through SAS was called “Child Labor in Rural India” and was sponsored by an NGO. We had to drive about 2 hours to the town of Kanchipuram, which was a wonderful scenic drive through rural India. During our visit with them we focused a lot on child labor, but that is only a small portion of the work that they do. The NGO is called RIDE (Rural Institute for Development Education.) Their main focus is empowerment and gender equality. They do a lot of work in the village communities focusing on encouraging women to work and not be dependent on men for money, explaining the value of savings, and teaching people the ins and outs of getting micro credit loans and helping them manage them. Their headquarters is not in a village, but in a very modest neighborhood. Their home and kitchen was on the bottom floor, their offices on the second, and their meeting room (which also served as our dining room) was on the third. We went here first and met with the director of the program, Jeyaraj. He started the program in 1984 and it has only grown since. He and his wife are both Catholic, but surprisingly none of their work has a missionary tone to it. They began to incorporate the child labor issue into their work in 1994. Now they have multiple bridge schools in these villages to encourage children to go to school and socialize them for government school. We visited one that afternoon.
The school is located right near the quarry villages. This is where the families that work in the stone quarries live. Children as young as 3 are working 200 feet down in these quarries, mining stone. The parents of these children do not understand the value of an education. They don’t understand what kind of jobs a child could get after attending school so they begin them working young to bring in money for the families. The teachers at the school have to round up the children from the village. Some days they can come and other days their responsibilities at home are too great and they cannot. This bridge school is working to get these children out of the quarries for good and trying to give them the skills they need to be able to attend government school. We were able to meet with a group of the children and interact with them. They performed for us a little and Jeyaraj engaged us in some questions and answers providing translation. He asked a few of them things like “do you like school?” “do you like working in the quarry?” The boy responded that working in the quarry was very hard work and he didn’t like it. They all said they loved school and to learn and to play. One said he only liked school to play. The children were absolutely adorable. I thought they were all aged about 5-7, until I was told they ranged from 8-10. I was shocked. Their malnourishment really had affected their height and facial features. They were still adorable though. Many of them were really talented artists and dancers and they loved to just run around. It was really fun to engage with them. It was crazy to think I was playing with little kids who had spent more hours of their life working than I had. And not only that, these kids spend their work day chipping away at stones for less than one dollar. It was hard not to feel badly, but their jovial spirits really helped. When you got them into a school environment with their friends they really acted like any normal children. It wasn’t hard to make one of them smile or laugh and it was really great just seeing what RIDE has done to help these children be children. We then got to walk through the quarry village and see the families and meet more children, many of which went to government school. In this village all of the homes were made of thatched roofs, most without four walls. Because these huts were single rooms, I believe there are separate huts for sleeping and cooking and cleaning. They actually have fire inside of the huts. The huts are pretty close together and a lot of families shared the land.
That night, we headed back to the headquarters and Jeyaraj’s wife had prepared us a really nice dinner. Indian hospitality is really one of a kind. This whole portion of my trip really made me love India and their hospitality and welcoming nature was a large part of why. Currently the have a German volunteer staying with them who is assisting them at the school, she told us that they really toned down the spice in their food for us, which I really appreciated. I was surprised that I liked most of it because I really do not like curry, but it actually isn’t in everything. That night, we stayed in a building they owned across the way which had a few stories of empty rooms and a few bathrooms. They had woven cots and pillows for all of us, which was a surprise for us. We didn’t know what to expect, we were thinking sleeping bags on the floor, so that was so nice.
The next morning was really hot!! After breakfast, we set off to visit a dalit village whose female members are part of RIDE’s self help groups. Dalit means that the members of this village are not part of the caste system, they are below the lowest caste, also known as “untouchables.” These are the most oppressed people in Indian society. We were in an extremely rural part of the town in the middle of all these beautiful green rice patties. This is where the majority of the village members work. The village people were very welcoming to us and first brought us to the center of their village in front of their temple. Their temple is a small one room shrine, but every village has something of this sort that they can pray too. Anyway, Jeyaraj explained to us that they as a village have received microcredit loans and as a village have bought cows and are selling the milk. I found this very interesting that they are doing this as a whole village. They were very proud of their ledgers and came around to show us their savings and loans ledgers. Jeyaraj had explained to us earlier that savings is a really crucial part to breaking the cycle of poverty. Many Indians, while still making very little money, make enough money to eat, live, and still save some. He explained though, that tradition and religion in India brings people to spend excessive amounts of money, all of their savings, on things like weddings or traveling to a certain area in India at a certain time of year to pray to a certain god. The village members then invited us into their homes so that we could see the way that they lived. Most of their huts had four clay walls and rooms, but had thatched roofs. Have no doubt, they all had cable television though!! The cables run really low, you have duck under them when walking up to a house and they have televisions in their common room, but nothing else! Each hut had running water so there was a washing area behind the hut. One of the houses I went in to I got to see a three day old baby in her mother’s arms!! It was so cute, but very sad to know that they do not name or photograph the child until it reaches one month old. Most of the children in this village were at school, so it was just the older family members around, but they were so very nice even though we could not communicate at all. Before we left, they gave all of us bindis (for our foreheads) and flowers for our hair. They really wanted to show us where they worked so they walked us through the rice patties outside the village. This was quite an experience. There is less than a foot of grass walking space between each patty, yes, I slipped once. It is just gorgeous out there cause everything is so green.
On our way back to the headquarters we stopped by another village that also was participated in their self help groups. I forgot to mention that RIDE has reached over 70,000 people with their self-help groups. They put these together in villages and this is where they discuss things like loans, savings, empowerment and self respect. This village was a caste village and they were in the business of silk making. The clay houses each had a silk loom in their common area which takes up the whole space. They are humongous. It takes 15-30 days to make one sari, depending on how fast you are working. It is a really slow process, we went to a silk factory later and watched first hand.
Before heading back to the ship we sat down with Jeyaraj and the senior members of RIDE once more to ask questions which was really cool. They have a very powerful message of self-respect that is really easy to appreciate no matter where you are from. Many of the women who now work for RIDE began as members of the self-help group and now want to give back. Many of them have children in college who are on their way to being very successful. Jeyaraj was very proud of one of their daughters who just became a police officer. This meant a lot to him because another thing (there are so many) that they work for is honest politics and policing.
So that trip was fantastic and really allowed me to see a completely different side of India than I did in the first day. While I saw a lot of tough things, meeting child laborers and oppressed members of society, I also saw a lot of great things. The people in the dalit village were so proud of their accomplishments. They are now awaiting a 100,000 rupees loan to buy even more cows and open a fruit stand. I saw laughing and dancing children. I saw a three day old newborn! Not to mention that rural India is really lush and beautiful!
We headed aback to the ship that night and I spent my last day in Chennai. (Almost done reading guys!!) That morning, my girlfriends and I all reconvened from our various Indian adventures and decided to visit the Missionaries of Charity Orphanage not far from the ship. They have morning visiting hours and SAS had offered trips there, but we had all been off traveling. I am really happy we visited. It looked exactly like you would expect a Mother Teresa’s orphanage to look like, like literally straight out of some video I watched in high school. It was really shocking at first because all of the children are either mentally or physically disabled, but once you found a child to connect with it was comfortable. They ones who are so physically disabled that they cannot walk or sit, they have laying on mats or bean bags. I sat down next to one, learned his name, and just started talking to him. I found the easiest way to communicate with them was to just touch them. Their faces lit up when you rubbed their arms or head. Sanjay was really ticklish and his mouth would open so wide when you tickled him. He couldn’t pull his head down to look at you, but he got excited if you made it into his line of sight. The sisters there are amazing, they really treat these children as if they were their own. (again, literally watching that movie from high school.) They held them, fed them, changed them, everything with such ease. It is really inspiring to watch someone have no judgment and treat someone so respectfully. I played with many other children too, but really now, I’ve been talking forever.
At noon, I headed back to the ship to meet up with a trip I was going on for my international media class. We visited this Indian film laboratory which was really cool. They produce Bollywood-esque films. (Bollywood films are from Mumbai and are in the language Hindi; In Chennai their films are in the language Tamil – but they are the same type of films if you have ever seen one.) We got to watch a ton of clips from various movies which was really the best part of the trip. Their films are really a kick. The dancing, singing, drama, costumes and decoration are just so out there and like nothing you would see in America. We got to walk through the areas where they actually print the film reels and then the mixing and editing studios. Interestingly, all movies in India are dubbed. No dancer/actress is actually singing and often they even have a different person speaking than acting. So their lip synchronization can be quite bad sometimes. That was a really cool visit!
So, India. Wow! That was long! I hope my impressions were not too drawn out. Again, though, I do wanna stress that I was only there for five days and I really saw practically nothing of India on the grand scheme of things. My experiences were very emotionally charged but so different than many of my fellow students. There is just so much disparity throughout Indian society is hard to grasp it all. A lot of the stuff I saw and felt is really hard to put into words, but I attempt. I have sooo many pictures from India it is going to be really hard to decide which ones to put up, I would love to share them all with you when I get home.
While in India I hit the halfway mark. Looking forward to hitting U.S. soil, but still got a lot more experiencing to go.
P.S. another addendum to this hideously long post –
I saw a volcano erupt today! We were passing by an island in the Red Sea that recently erupted. It was still smoking and my handy dandy binoculars allowed me to see red lava spewing out of the top as well as the damage from the big spill! Very exciting!
A typical streetcorner.
Sunrise opposite the Taj.
The Taj Mahal, up close and personal!
Me and some of the children from the village. The blue bottom and white top means that they attend government school.
